It is known for a vehicle, such as a car, to have both a vehicle bus and a user bus. As known, typically the vehicle bus supports the various vehicle systems, such as an engine, instrument display, door locks, flashing lights, etc. Also, typically the user bus supports various user devices, such as a cell phone, a radio frequency ("RF") data device, a pager, a global positioning satellite ("GPS") receiver, etc.
As known, the vehicular bus contains various proprietary information and safety-related information such as, for example, an anti-theft system computer program or an anti-lock braking system computer program. As a result, generally the user bus is not directly coupled to the vehicular bus; instead, the user bus is coupled to the vehicular bus by means of a gateway.
With the recent trend of providing user devices with increased functionality, it is desirable that the user bus be provided with some means to communicate with the vehicular bus. Further, in order to support increasingly enhanced user applications, it is necessary to provide the user devices with a method to interact with the functionality of the individual vehicular devices.
As a result, it would be desirable to enable the user devices to obtain the functionality of the vehicle devices by means of the aforementioned gateway. As a result, there is a need for a method for registering the functionality of the vehicular devices on the vehicular bus with the gateway.